ROSENBERG: QB or not QB? That is the question

Bye-week anxiety can cause even the most grounded fantasy owners (I, of course, am not a member of this particular species) to turn into Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz.

Front-runners who cruise through the first leg of the season and already have their victory speeches prepared before Halloween often sabotage themselves by straying from the gameplan and micromanaging their way into nothingness — the price to be paid for the inability to resist the temptation to dismantle a perfectly sound engine in the name of a quick fix and losing sight of the big picture.

To avoid falling into that trap is the challenge before me.

While my roster, in any fantasy season, tends to be a revolving door, I have always subscribed to the "if it ain't broke" theory, which states that thou shalt not mess with that which is working.

And right at this very moment, everything is working to perfection.

Thanks to my five horsemen — Drew Brees, Fred Jackson, Steve Smith, Jason Witten and Marques Colston — I sport a nifty 7-0 record entering Week 8 and have now won 18 straight head-to-head matchups (including playoffs) in my league dating back to Week 4 last season, when Michael Vick led the charge to my first championship in five years.

My roster is loaded, depth is an unexpected luxury and the majority of my core starters already are through their bye weeks. Even my bench-riding disappointments (I'm running low on rotten tomatoes and lettuce heads to throw at Rashard Mendenhall and Mario Manningham) have value to other owners who have been inquiring for weeks about their availability and my asking price.

But while the Ding Dong trees I planted next to the Twinkie patch out back two months ago have really taken off, don't think for a second that complacency has set in or that the champagne fountain is already set up in the living room.

We have an eternity to go, and I still need to come up with a backup quarterback.

I was counting on Jason Campbell to spell Brees in Week 11, but the plan changed when Campbell suffered a broken collarbone two weeks ago, likely ending his season and his brief tenure as Oakland's starter.

This is where the Raiders fan in me could muck everything up. Again.

Faced with the specter of watching Kyle Boller lead them back into the lake of fire, the Raiders paid a fraternity bar tab to acquire the retired Carson Palmer from the Bengals (Palmer gets a pass for his three-interception debut last weekend, but that's it).

The fan in me was ecstatic when the Raiders added Palmer, a two-time Pro Bowl performer who could be the answer to my Week 11 prayers (he'll also be up to speed on the playbook and in tune with his receiving corps by then).

The question now is, how much am I willing to pay for him?

A Mendenhall-for-Palmer offer has been on the table for a couple weeks now, and it would be easy to pull the trigger on a deal based on my glaring need for a No. 2 QB and my lack of attachment to, and use for, Mendenhall.

Barring injury, Mendenhall, a second-round bust to date, is likely to make only one more appearance in my starting lineup, which would be as a flex (wide receiver/running back) stunt double for Colston in Week 11. The problem, though, is that injuries always seem to creep into the picture.

By dealing Mendenhall, I would be sacrificing long-term depth for a one-week Palmer cameo that would leave me vulnerable to a hostile takeover down the stretch should the Injury Fairy come a-knockin' like she did with alarming frequency this past baseball season.